SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
I have not yet been an armed warrior during this lifetime or experienced combat this time around. But I’ll bet I have done that during past lives, and I bet so have you. We are all subliminal experts and veteran victims of combat.
If you reject these writings because you refuse to believe in reincarnation or because you insist that civilians should shut up about war, too bad. Read this or refuse to, figure it out or not. All I can do is offer it up to you.
We must drink deep the blood acid vomit of war without experiencing it first-hand. We must take a full breath of that flower’s rancid perfume and wipe our face with its fecal dew. We must know what we’ve missed, the way we would recall our first sexual kiss.
Let us evoke combat from the writings of those who experienced it for us, as well as from our past experience; that we may stop rehearsing it so often in present and future worlds—much less frequently than in worlds and reincarnations of the past.
I can tell you what my grandfather told me. He said the sweetest fruit he had ever tasted
– and we lived in
That when you’re squad gets caught out in a firestorm far from shelter, it’s best to fall flat in a file and crawl forward until your head nuzzles under the crotch of the next man ahead, then cover his ass with your helmet. How funny he found it when one man crapped his pants (as do more than one out of four combatants under fire) on the head of the fellow below. They lived through that firestorm terrible enough to make one of them crap in his pants, and got to laugh about it!
Or my father telling me about catching lice with his company under a rotting pier; or solemnly showing me a narrow, cobbled beach at the bottom of a deep-shadowed gorge, too steep to climb down into blindly, though there may have been a hidden path. My father never showed me and we never went back, though it was quite close to home.
His best friend and a landing craft full of cavalry tank destroyer scouts were massacred by German machine gun crossfire, probably sited from the cliff perch where we stood, a hundred feet or more (I was young back then and small) above the rocky beach below, along the coastal highway. Out on the far right flank of the American landing in Provence (Southern France), beyond which the French Commando Brigade got massacred. My dad was a very lucky man.
Another of his best buddies died after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. He commanded the only tank platoon in that place, flown there in pieces, and him with both arms broken and set in plaster casts. He died during the death march out.
Or the story my father once told me, when he was the point officer of an American horse cavalry regiment marching hundreds of miles from Texas to Kansas and back, one of the last marches like that in American history, returning heat-drugged to post.
The point horses of his advance guard got wind of the post when they neared it and charged over the crest and down into the valley below, back to their beloved stalls and out from under the crushing sun and their dozing riders. No doubt a few of them tumbled off, though he didn’t tell me and I was too stupid to ask.
My father sent word back along the column, to wake everyone up because the horses were going to get frisky. I’ll bet they made a grand entrance on post, in fine, tight parade formation, looking great after a masterful march. He never said. But I saw the pride in his eyes.
Both parsed their stories painfully brief, and doled them out to me sparingly, though they knew I’d listen rapt. Such was the pain of their recall.
Let’s don the muddy boots of an average combat infantryman. On PeaceWorld, every child would be taught this kind of thing until it was ordinary fare—but nothing whatsoever of military glory. Eight-year-olds would have taken COMBAT INFANTRY WARRIOR by dictation in school, or devoured in a comic book.
Instead of waking up in a soft bed in a warm room down the hall from loving parents, or alongside a sweet mate bent on loving, or just alone and shiftless by yourself; you start up from rotting litter in some dank hole, awakened by unwelcome itching, amidst a high-explosive cacophony that has stunned your sensibilities for months, or to an ominous quiet that portends nothing good.
The horizon rumbles with the distant grumble of heavy artillery – yours, if you’re lucky; the other side’s or both, if you’re not – it sounds surprisingly like the noise your empty tummy makes—except that it is shaking the entire landscape in addition to your intimate guts. Hungry for more, it drifts a little dust into your hole. Beware that it might come screaming closer, to sniff you out and eat you for breakfast! Nothing you could do about it, in any case.
You are terribly alone, surrounded by steaming huddles of fellow sufferers buried invisible. None of you has set aside your rotten shoes or shit-colored rags, or rested or bathed properly for a fortnight. If you slept at all, your deathlike coma was bathed in sweat, crowded with nightmares and maddeningly interrupted at every moment. This zombie haze of sleep deprivation is your constant lot, and that of your decision-making officers.
This blackened damp morning is like every other: either sweltering hot or freezing cold, depending on seasonal excess. Who would have dreamt – in the coziness of city or country homes – that mere weather could be so savage?
A pervasive stench fills your nostrils. It is common to all battlefields: a compound of mud or dust, foul breath, body odor and human waste, moldy clothing, food and equipment, of high-explosive gasses, and rotting, seared lumps of flesh of every description. For almost the last hundred years, the underlying stink would be the universal one of diesel fumes. All the forbidden fluids and toxic effluvia you shunned during peacetime will make up your daily body bath during war. The stench of it will fester in your psyche until you die; any hint of it, during your remote civilian future, will fire up post-traumatic fugues.
You ache everywhere and gut-twisting diarrhea trots right along behind you—half from dread and its immune-suppressing pall, and half from the fecal breakfast you were just lucky enough to choke down. Your muscles are saturated with acid, the milk of overwork. Your skin crawls with a maddening mob of lice (the combatant’s constant companion), and a sticky, stinking glaze of filth. You suffer from embarrassing sores and chronic complaints no one will acknowledge except with ridicule. You must cough, sneeze or shit at perilous moments, and imperil your friends while doing so. You’ve lost more weight than would be normal or healthy. Your exhaustion would flatten you under normal circumstances; any doctor worth his salt would take one look at your sorry ass and send it to bed for a week’s rest. Not here, not now.
You are starving and crazed with thirst. For every torment spared you by the genius of your nation’s combat logistics, a dozen more plague you, worse and unfixable. Whether you’re a clinical alcoholic or not, the false promise of alcohol and drugs will make you suffer like the damned. You would do anything for a swig or needle shot of escape. Nonetheless, neither food nor drink nor drugs – those musty horrors available in your pigsty – are of any consolation to you.
Only the fitful mails can console you now. They are just as likely to bring tidings that your mate went mad with loneliness and threw herself at the nearest asshole, or that your family and friends expired during the latest martial atrocity at home and have abandoned you forever.
Instead of monotonous commutes without end to a moderately tolerable job, you face the rumbling machinery of industrial hate that stretches out beyond the horizon: the entire genius, fortune and flower of youth of some random country whose citizens you never met or held quarrel with—totally, devoted, to, your, personal, extermination. Gulp!
Your army’s firepower is as threatening to you as the enemy’s. Front-line soldiers can and will be massacred by either side. Mechanized forces are hotbeds of lethal disaster; everyone’s artillery, tanks and aircraft are perfectly designed to annihilate your flimsy, transparent vulnerability. Disease and accidents can kill you just as dead as combat. Death is not picky on a battlefield.
Danger lurks everywhere, and quiet execution by firing squad or a squad leader’s pistol, if you tarry too long in safety. No certainty or security awaits you, except in tidy rows of a military cemetery or convalescent ward; otherwise in a common and anonymous grave carved out by a bulldozer, or in some moist, cry-torn and pestilential first aid grotto: from first aid to last rites.
Instead of schmoozing with familiar, competent and reasonably sane people under the constraints of civility and law, you face lost souls as filthy and miserable as you. Instead of a coterie of friends and acquaintances long nourished by mutual kindness; they are a bunch of smelly, brutish and vulgar compulsive-neurotics with whom you share nothing but this misery motivated by petty spite and perfectly rational terror. If you’re lucky enough and possessed of worthy courage, they’ll treat you better than a noble brother would, during shining moments of crisis, share their last crust of bread and sip of water with you, risk their lives to save yours—and misuse you like dirt at any other moment. Your tender feelings and abused bodies will be at each other’s mercy. No choice in the matter.
This morning brings endless upset and anxiety to you and your precious friends. You’ve become sly, by now, as superstitious as cannibals and feral-wary of every Other.
If you find some pocket of relative security, combat may become the least of your worries. You will be bullied by rear area slave-masters handpicked for insensitivity and intent on keeping you cowed: brutish professionals you would never consort with in private nor trust in combat—to carry out endless rounds of meaningless, filthy and exhausting chores. Their only response to your demand for dignity: reflexive insult, brutality and further consignment to dangerous tasks. Their relative safety dictates your peril, their meager comfort, your misery. Imps lining the entrance of Hell, goading the damned to their doom—their primary purpose to is drive you back into the firefight. Like other repressive institutions in peacetime, like cilia lining peristaltic intestines, sending wastes along their way after squeezing every shred of life from them.
Your commanders will be more intent on the enemy’s destruction than your wellbeing. If they are good guys, they will work themselves to death seeing that you are fed and housed to minimum standards. They will briefly regret your bug-like distress and extinction, then carry on. If not, they won’t give a damn; indeed, they’ll seek promotion by promoting your discomfort.
That’s what makes a general and earns him his stars. His primary task is to nail you and your friends to some untenable post, then send you on endless marches into greater peril, until you become casualties like so much lost luggage useless for further trouble. That is his duty, glory and reward.
Your best friends will die before your eyes or be horribly mangled in your arms, and also their replacements and their replacements afterwards, and likely yourself in the long run. After witnessing their agony, you will bury them in some common hole (the thousandth one you dug) that took precious hours of exhaustion to scratch from the dirt the stubborn rocks and roots at your feet. It’s amazing how much labor is involved in digging a proper grave or a decent dugout.
“The
‘million dollar’ wound (as suffered by Hollywood heroes) is caused by a high
velocity military bullet, undistorted and still encased in its metal skin,
which passes straight through relatively elastic muscle tissue and out the
other side, making a pencil-thin tunnel and leaving a star-shaped exit wound
only about three-quarters of an inch across.
However, the size of the tunnel caused by the bullet’s passage varies
due to yawing. For roughly the first 6in
of its journey the fully jacketed bullet continues point first, and this may
well be enough to take it out the far side; but because the heavier base of the
bullet still wants to be at the front, after that distance it begins to turn
around or cartwheel. When this tumbling
reaches 90° the bullet is traveling sideways, thus enlarging the tunnel to more
than an inch across. By the time it has
traveled through tissue for about 15in it is moving base first, and the tunnel
resumes its original width. Irrespective
of the distance traveled inside the body, however, a bullet which hits major
bones may break up; the metal jacket and soft lead core may separate into
irregular pieces, each of which travels on in unpredictable directions—as do
the pieces of broken bone. In such
cases, the exit wound may be up to 5in across.
[Note: go measure that on the skin of your torso: a bleeding wound five
inches around]. Limb wounds which
shatter the long bones can cause massive damage; particularly to the legs,
where splintered bones threaten major blood vessels. Even a ‘clean’ penetration of the heart,
liver of major blood vessels is usually fatal, and brain damage normally has
devastating results even when the victim survives: …
[Author’s note:
bullet-proof armor and modern surgical techniques permit the survival of more
and more wounded soldiers who used to die quickly: those struck at exposed
portions of the face and neck leading to their brain and cervical
vertebra. Another, larger group gets its
brain concussed by explosives and suffers more or less serious and permanent
mental impairment. Thus many wounded
veterans live out the rest of their lives more or less vegetative and/or
paralyzed. Yet another bunch of
high-tech survivors lose unarmored appendages: arms and legs, hands and feet].
“… apart from
yawing and bone strikes; the amount of damage a bullet causes depends upon
another effect known as cavitation.
“Imagine a tennis
ball, drilled through the center and sliding freely long a pencil-thin
rod. The rod is the tunnel made by the
bullet – the ‘permanent cavity’; the ball is the ‘temporary cavity’ caused all
around that path by a brief but powerful shock wave following immediately
behind the bullet, cavity up to 7in across, which then collapses inwards again
(the vacuum effect may also suck dirt through the entry wound into the bullet
track). Some organs, such as the liver,
can rarely survive this process; others, such as the lung, are less affected
“The crushed muscle tissue of
the permanent cavity and the stretched tissue of the temporary cavity are both,
in effect, pulped, with their blood supply through minor vessels disrupted; if
left untreated the flesh will rot (necrotize), producing an ideal breeding
ground for bacteria. The surgical
treatment therefore involves debridement – the cutting away of the dead tissue
and of a margin of healthy tissue around it; this is more or less radical
depending upon individual circumstances, and the correct timing and degree of
debridement are matters of professional discussion among trauma surgeons. In the best case, new healthy tissue will
grow inwards all around the debrided wound.
In the worst case, sepsis will occur – gangrene – and the patient’s prospects
become seriously worrying.” Martin Windrow, The
Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam, Da Capo Press,
Perseus Books Group, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004. Originally published by Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, London, England, 2004, pp. 533-534.
(See also, below the next paragraph.)
“No weapon frightens me as much as the
shell. Bullets have certain logic. Put a sizeable enough piece of concrete
between yourself and the firer and you will be untouched. Run between cover, for it is difficult even
for an experienced shot to hit a man who sprints fast. Even when people around you are hit, the
wounds seldom seem so bad, unless the bullet has tumbled in flight or hit them
in the head. But shells? They can do things to the human body you
never believed possible; turn it inside out like a steaming rose; bend it
backwards and through itself; chop it up; shred it; pulp it: mutilations so
base and vile they never stopped revolting me.
And there is no real cover from shellfire. Shells can drop out the sky to your feet, or
smash their way through any piece of architecture to find you. Some of the ordnance the Russians were using
was slicing through ten-storey buildings before exploding in the basement. Shells could arrive silently and unannounced,
or whistle and howl their way in, a sound that somehow seems to tear at your
nerves more than warn you of anything.
It’s only the detonation which always seems the same – a feeling as much
as a sound, a hideous suck-roar-thump that in itself, should you be close
enough, can collapse your palate and liquefy your brain.” Anthony Boyd, My War Gone
By, I Miss It So, Penguin Group, New York, London, 2001, first published by
DoubleDay, New York, 1999, p. 244.
“The most clichéd
but accurate metaphor for the sound of incoming shells in flight is that of an
old-fashioned steam express train rushing past a few feet away. Depending on their distance, speed and angle
[and caliber], shells tunneling through the air make lightly different noises;
so a heavy barrage weaves itself into a bewildering cacophony of sounds; but
the rushing always ends the same way, with a thunderclap detonation –
sschhiiii… boom! Hollywood’s microphones
fail to convey either the sharpness or the loudness of battlefield explosions;
and the visual effects normally used to simulate shellfire – with plastic bags
of petrol and aluminum silicate – are equally misleading. In reality the eye usually registers a shell
burst as an instantaneous orange-yellow flash inside a dark, leaping fountain
of mixed smoke and pulverized earth, sometimes studded and fringed with large
pieces of slower-moving debris. The
bigger, heavier chunks of earth and stones thrown up by the explosion fall
nearby first; the smaller debris, blown much higher,
comes pattering and clinking down for a considerable time afterwards and over a
wider area.
“The instantaneous
pressure wave from the explosion moves outwards at supersonic speed – this is
the expanding ring effect seen fleetingly in, for example, aerial footage
showing the explosions of ‘sticks’ of bombs.
It is followed after a slight but appreciable interval by a blast wind –
the bulk flow of hot gases, fragments and ground debris away from the
explosion. People in the target area
experience the pressure wave as a sharp squeezing sensation in the chest, and
its shock is also felt through the ground underfoot; this shuddering of the
earth is powerful enough to make those sheltering in trenches fear
(justifiably) that they are about to be buried alive, and those who are lying
flat feel themselves being shrugged violently into the air. These sensations are accompanied by
stupefying noise, and under heavy and persistent fire all the physical senses
are overwhelmed. Completely impotent to
affect their chances of survival, soldiers find sustained shelling and
mortaring the worst ordeal of battle; those experiencing it often become
temporarily unhinged, losing all muscular control (including of the bladder and
sphincter) and the capacity of any rational thought beyond ‘Oh please God
no…’ These effects are particularly
marked among men exposed to shellfire for the first time—as were the great
majority at Dien Bien Phu. Although
these physical and mental reactions are quite involuntary, the fear is
rational: in modern warfare it is shell and mortar bombs that cause the great
majority of casualties.
“In that minority of cases when
men suffer a virtually direct hit from artillery the result is complete
destruction of the body: “The shell hit him, I’m telling you, it blew him to
tiny little bits… a booted foot, a section of human cranium, a bunch of
fingers, a bit of clothing. It was
simply a matter of little, tiny bits.’ To be a
witness to this utter physical annihilation – perhaps of a friend – is
particularly shocking; it abruptly tears away a number of necessary
self-protective illusions all at once.
When a body has been blown up, the spinal column – surprisingly
resilient – often survives after a shell has fallen among a group of men;
counting the remaining spines is sometimes the simplest way to determine the
number of dead.
“Most injuries,
however, occur further out from the site of the explosion. Blast injuries to the human body are
categorized as primary, secondary and tertiary.
The first is the direct effect of the pressure wave; the second, the
effect of projectiles and debris carried by the blast wind; the third, the
result of the body being thrown through the air and smashing into the ground or
other obstacles.
“The most obvious
sign of primary injury is rupture of the eardrums, which may occur when air
pressure rises to anything between 5 and 15 [additional] pounds per square inch
[normal atmospheric pressure is 14.7 psi]; war
memoirs offer many instances of men killed by blast who appear peacefully
asleep apart from tell-tale bleeding from the ears. The lethal internal damage caused by
pressures of 50psi and upwards do[es] not present
dramatic outward signs (though shellfire casualties typically suffer multiple
injuries). It is the gas-containing
organs which sustain immediate and often fatal damage from the pressure wave:
the lungs and occasionally the colon suffer catastrophic injury from the
instantaneous compression effect of the blast.
Large blood-filled cavities are formed in the spongy alveoli of the
lung, and fatal air embolisms are released into the arterial system; less
often, the bowels may rupture, as – in a few cases – may the spleen and liver.
“Secondary injuries
will be more obviously dramatic. When a
shell bursts the steel case breaks up into fragments of all shapes and sizes,
from tiny beads to twisted chunks weighing several pounds. These – together with stones, pieces of
weapons and equipment, and even large bone fragments from casualties nearer the
blast – whirl outwards from the center at different speeds. The effects of being struck by shell
fragments (usually, though incorrectly called ‘shrapnel’) vary as widely as the
size and speed of the metal shards. Sometimes
a man is unaware that he has been pierced by a small splinter until somebody
else points out the bloodstained hole in his clothing. Larger fragments, cartwheeling unevenly
through the air edged with jagged blades and hooks, can dismember and
disembowel.
“In many cases the evidence confronting
an eyewitness is all too vivid. In
others the immediate reaction is one of simple puzzlement: blast and steel can
play such extreme games with the human form that the observer does not
understand what he is looking at. When
some random physical reference point suddenly jerks the whole image into a
comprehensible pattern, the shock of recognition may be appalling. The results of massive destruction – the
ruined hulk of a torso, the crimson rack of ribs, the glistening entrails,
limbs ripped away and scattered, a severed head – have a charnel house squalor
that denies all human dignity. On chilly
evenings at Dien Bien Phu, the warm, gaping body cavities steamed visibly, and
the opened-up bowels gave off a stink of faeces.” Martin Windrow, The
Last Valley, op. cit., pp. 371-374.
Or check out Southern Lebanon
or Palestine within the last few years…
Am I really in the Twenty-First Century of the Christian Era on Earth?!?
“It comes down to physics. What movies cannot render is that, often, the most lethal aspect of an explosion is not the scattering of projectiles in its blast, but the tremendous shock wave that blast releases. And whereas this shock wave rapidly weakens over the open ground of a traditional battlefield, the canyonlike structure of a city provides both channels for it to travel and an amplifying effect as it caroms off surrounding walls and building. This wave, too, will gradually weaken as it moves away from the source, but it’s exponentially more concentrated force will inflict far greater damage. It is also likely to leave behind clearly delineated, concentric circles of destruction. Much like reading the growth rings of a tree, a seasoned observer examining these circles can quite easily determine the explosion’s precise epicenter, even if no obvious physical evidence – a crater, for example – is left behind.
“In the immediate blast area, the ground will be swept perfectly clean. Naturally the size of this epicenter will depend on the explosion’s magnitude – given the range of ordnance most commonly used by modern armies, it might extend anywhere from fifteen to eighty feet – but within this area, there will not be a scrap of paper or a nugget of loose asphalt, and anyone unlucky enough to have been standing there was not flung or somersaulted to their death, but vaporized: not a tooth, not a patch of clothing or a shoelace, they have simply turned to mist.
“Moving past the epicenter, one will begin to come across small bits of debris, including scraps of flesh, but initially these will be so minute and degraded as to be unrecognizable. A little farther out and these scraps will become larger, but distinguishing them from mere detritus will still be difficult because human bodies break apart in unpredictable ways, and the parts here will be blackened with scorch marks, encrusted with dirt and gravel, so as to be easy to mistake for clumps of singed fabric or even twisted fragments of metal.
“Beyond this ring, the human remains will start to take on recognizable form. At first, these are likely to be mostly detached limbs and torsos, some still clothed, but most naked or bare to their underwear, their outer garments having been shredded or burned away in the initial blast. In this area, there may also be a number of bodies without heads. This is because the head is the heaviest part of the human body, as well as its most delicately attached, and in the tremendous concussion of an artillery blast, it often severs at the top vertebrae of the spinal column. It is not at all uncommon in such situation to come across three or four heads lined up against a street curb or the side of a building some distance away from the explosion, the heads having rolled until coming to an obstacle to halt their momentum. In this section, one will also begin to come across the first of the survivors, most grievously wounded, and since many of them will still be conscious and pleading for a help that is beyond the ability of anyone to give them, it is usually this area that is the most upsetting to the eye witness.
“At a certain point away from the epicenter – anywhere from sixty to three hundred feet, again depending on the explosion’s magnitude – it will appear one has reached the outer edge of destruction, but this will probably not be true. Depending on the trajectory of the shell and the architectural peculiarities of the city, shock waves are likely to have traveled through the surrounding building and alleyways, and there one is liable to find a number of more dead with no visible wounds upon them. These will be people who have essentially been crushed, their internal organs bursting from the tremendous split-second force to which they were exposed, and it is not at all abnormal to find these victims still sitting upright in chairs, as if they are merely napping or gazing meditatively into space.
“But as ghastly as all this is, those who fall direct victims to an artillery shell’s blast and shock wave normally represent only a portion of those killed when a city is bombarded. Many more are felled by glass shards from blown-out windows; these are like thousands of jagged daggers streaking out in all direction, sometimes with enough velocity to pierce metal or concrete or pass clean through a human chest. Others die from having buildings topple on them. And then there are the fires which so often accompany bombardments. While more advanced armies have developed firebombs that literally suck the oxygen out of a targeted area, quickly exterminating all within, the more common form of death in such circumstances is the protracted ordeal of carbon-monoxide poisoning as the building around the victim slowly burns. And then, of course, there are those who linger for a time, who don’t succumb to their wounds until the next day or the one after that…” Scott Anderson, Moonlight Hotel, Doubleday, Random House, 2006, pp. 168-170.
Otherwise, you will have to lug their leaden, broken body awkwardly to some uncertain fate in the rear; half-willing they should croak and relieve you of the struggle to save them. Precious friendships and loyalties will twist in your heart like daggers; you will shun them eventually. No more such painful friendships for you.
Who cares about anyone but your own vermin-infested kind? Everyone except your narrow squad mates – ally, foe and non-combatant alike – will assume the phantom shadow of non-human wraiths whose suffering and extermination are matters of relief, indifference and derisive sport. Most of all, you will despise those pasty-faced civilians you were sent here to defend. Wishing them fates worse than your own, you will worsen the common lot with the black magic of your envy.
Sooner or later, you and every survivor not a sociopath-born will turn into post-traumatized zombies—at which point, nothing whatsoever will matter until you’ve received months of professional help, and perhaps never again regardless. You will never fully recover.
Your only real assignment is to kill and (if feasible) not be killed. You will be called upon to perform with professional skill every crime you despise. Nothing but complete acceptance of this criminal degradation will let you escape from this hell with your body intact, though your soul may come out in tatters. Your hatred will blind you. Your enemies’ screams of agony will become music to your ears, as may the wail of hapless women and children unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire. Plunder will become sport. Any decency you once treasured will be ripped from you, and every perversion of justice and compassion will become routine.
It won’t be ‘til then that you will fully understand the perversion that is war. Unfortunately, too late to do anything about it, except to compound its misery. Your options will narrow to mere survival (and perhaps not even that). Everything else will seem insignificant to you, empty words and hollow feelings, compared to the black and white reality of combat and the rush of raw survival.
Stripped of the vague grays and chuckling rainbows of civilian life, you may become addicted to your dilemma and unfit to resume the trappings of peace. In that case, your own beloved society, long-experienced at the arts of social triage, will quietly snuff out your miserable existence once you return to its embrace—without pause, mercy, dignity or regret. You will not even be counted among the casualties of war, much less honored for your sacrifice. More veterans die that way, abandoned by everyone at home, than in combat.
These days, more children die from war than soldiers.
Tomorrow’s wake-up will be much like today’s, and much like yesterday’s, and that of the day before, unless some new disaster tests the limits of your courage, sanity and endurance, and likely causes you to flail, wail and perish.
Instead of manly and heroic appeals to duty, honor, country and God that you would expect to pronounce under such imaginary circumstances; your last gasped words are likely to be baby cries: ma, mommy, mama – that she might come save you from this agony – your last-stand reversion to the familiar comforts of infancy. All your precious manhood will leak out from you with your blood.
No one will care much about you for very long. If you were a parent, your death will multiply the misery of your children and their mother, in addition to those beyond bearing of your parents. Those grieving your loss with shut up about it, eventually, whether in victory or in defeat. Then they will die in their turn, and your wasted life will be completely forgotten. Your misery will become a hallowed abstraction, less than a footnote in history books that have buried so many wasted lives in military jargon and socio-political gibberish. Less meaningful than the death of a worker ant. Like a moth to the flame, your passionate, pristine existence, born and raised tenderly by devoted parents and guardians, will add its featherweight of fuel to the Jive Drive and thus ensure that endless yous, reincarnated in the children to come, will have to retrace your melancholy path.
Now tell me, dear Learner, how can the reassuring routines of peace and progress prepare us for this interminable agony—compared to which Christ’s mere daylong Crucifixion would have been a stroll in the park? Only gradual, hypnotic conditioning from birth, paralleled by a thousand years of compulsive abuse and obsessive oppression – courtesy of weapon civilization – could prevent us from abandoning this charnel madhouse screaming our lungs out, or from defying the obvious psychopaths who’d dare poke our tender extremities into this patriotic blaze, like weenies crackling in a campfire.
It would be better if there were no more war on Earth, only peace. Not no combat at all, at least not for awhile—but much less so, now, and less than that over time.
- LEARNER PEACEWORLD -
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to
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